A quiet little spot where Rod Mollise shares his adventures and misadventures...

Sunday, November 04, 2012

Requiem for the Personal Planetarium

“What in the
H-E-Double hockey sticks is a ‘personal planetarium,’ Unk?” One of those recent
wonders of modern technology that are amazing at first, but turn out to be
amazingly short lived. I am not talking about something like a Spitz Junior Planetarium—I said “recent,” old
timers. Nor am I talking about one of those snazzy new Sega planetariums. I am
not talking about a planetarium projector
of any kind, muchachos.

A “personal
planetarium” in the language of Meade and Celestron was what I would actually call
a “star finder.” Not a low tech paper planisphere like little Unk used to help
him find stars and constellations back in the 1960s, though, but an electronic
device, a gadget shaped like a camcorder or, in Meade’s case, a pistol, which
could automatically identify and find objects in the sky.

Celestron’s SkyScout was first out the gate seven years
ago. When it hit the streets, somewhat tech-baffled old Unk was gobsmacked. It
was a little like a Telrad, a zero/unit power sight you held in your hands. You
sighted stars or planets, mashed a button when you had your target centered in
the LED-illuminated sight, and whatever you were pointed at would be identified
with text on an LCD screen. It got better. Many objects had audio descriptions.
Mash another button and you would hear Stardate veteran Sandy Wood tell you all about
it (via earbuds).

Like they
say on the dadgum WTBS late at night, “that ain’t all.” Even more amazingly, the widget could guide you to any of the objects in its database.
Select said target on the LCD screen via a cursor/scroll button and The ‘Scout
would lead you right to it, flashing LEDs in the sighting window to show you
which way to move.

How did this
camcorder sized gadget do these things? In addition to an onboard GPS receiver,
it possessed a built-in electronic compass and accelerometers. In other words,
basically the same technology that went into the ground-breaking NexStar GPS
telescopes at the turn of the century, and which could now go into a (fairly)
small and (somewhat) popularly priced hand-held device.

This
SkyScout sounded fascinating, and if, as Celestron suggested, it would be
possible to hook the thing to a telescope, it might go beyond fascinating into
“way-cool,” but Luddite old Unk was not convinced.
He could not see what this toy would do for the average amateur astronomer, and
given its price, $399.00, it would be hard to convince most parents to buy one on
a whim for little Bud or Sis. I concluded my dismissal of the SkyScout in t his
2006 article by saying “At $199.00 this would be an incredible buy for anybody;
just for the built-in GPS receiver.” Not that I expected the price of the
SkyScout to come down that level anytime soon, if ever.

While
waiting for Celestron to back off the 400 simoleons fare, Unk was amused,
bemused, and somewhat intrigued, if not surprised, that longtime Celestron
rival Meade was advertising a competing product, the MySky, about a year after the release of the SkyScout. I was
impressed. By Meade’s ebullient advertising copy, at least.

In
appearance, the vaguely pistol-shaped MySky seemed a little
clunky, really more like a cordless electric drill with a rechargeable battery
pack attached to the grip than a Glock. But it had one thing the SkyScout did
not: a full color video screen,
albeit a small low resolution 480x234 one. It was still a video screen, howsomeever, and showed
little movies about some of the objects. Most of all, it gave you a
computer-planetarium like display that blew the SkyScout’s text
only black and white LCD out of the water.

The MySky didn’t
just sound more high tech, it sounded more intuitively useable and useful. Instead of peering through a Telrad style peephole
as on the SkyScout, you did rough aiming by watching a display of
constellations and objects on the screen, and lined up precisely using the
illuminated pistol sights.

That was the
“more intuitive” part. The more useful part? Meade didn’t just make noises
about you being able to connect the MySky to a telescope “soon,” like Celestron
did; it was ready to go for that right out of the box. No interface device required,
just a simple cable. Plug the dang thing into your Autostar scope and (we were
told), you could point the MySky at any object in the sky, pull its trigger,
and your telescope would go there. In order to make that practical, the MySky was
equipped with an onboard library of 30,000 objects, which dwarfed the
SkyScout’s paltry 6,000 (mostly stars). It got even better. No GPS on your
Meade scope? The MySky would give it
GPS!

If only the
MySky had worked out. It didn’t, but not for the reason a few amateurs feared.
Some of the denizens of our beloved Cloudy Nights bulletin board worried the
MySky looked too much like a weapon,
and that the country would soon be inundated with headlines like, “SWAT Team
Kills Amateur Astronomers. ‘Looked like they had guns,’ says Clancy the cop.” The
MySky didn’t really look much like a weapon, and it wasn’t around long enough
in great enough numbers for that to become even a possibility, anyway. The real
problem with the MySky was it didn’t work right or reliably.

A few people
had good luck with their MySkys initially. But they were in the minority. Numerous
new owners found the GPS receivers in their toys did not work. Yeah, you could
select a site manually, but what fun was there in that? Meade attempted to
remedy the situation by releasing firmware updates, but the process of loading
new software onto the MySky’s memory card all too often resulted in the device
being reduced to the functionality of a brick.

Those who did
have good luck with the thing? Most did not have good luck for long. When
Meade, who was experiencing serious financial difficulties at the time, had the MySky
built for ‘em in China, they must have specified AS CHEAP AS POSSIBLE as their
number one requirement. All too many folks found the groovy trigger switch
lasted only a few outings, and lots more discovered that you didn’t have to
drop your MySky from a height to destroy it. Setting it up on its handle and
having it tip over was the end for numerous MySkys.

Meade went
about damage control in the pitiful way they sometimes have. They soon
released the MySky Plus. Which has
got to be the most laughable product update, ever. The “plus” was that the GPS
receiver was rendered non-functional (!) in the new model. Instead, you selected your site from a list.
Nothing at all was done to improve the build quality of the device, either. In
other words, Meade’s upgrade was
actually a downgrade.

Disabling
the GPS was not really a big deal, since it really wasn’t a GPS to begin with. At
least it did not output coordinates the MySky used to update its position. All the
receiver did was help the MySky select the nearest city to the GPS fix position
from a list, which was exactly what you did manually with the Plus. What was bad was that in changing the
software Meade must have broken something—bad—since the Pluses tend to be less
accurate by far than the original MySkys. The "accuracy" of some of the newer ones was measured in tens
of degrees.

I saw a
(non-Plus) MySky in action one year at the Deep South Regional Star Gaze, and
was somewhat impressed. BUT mainly I was disappointed. Not only did the (faux)
GPS receiver take an awful long time to acquire a fix, the owner discovered he
had to lay the MySky down on its side and leave it alone or it would never get one. Also, the color video
screen that seemed a little small in the pictures, was positively tiny (and
fuzzy) in person.

And that, it
appeared, was that. I couldn’t figure out what I’d do with a SkyScout, and the
MySky turned out to not ready for prime time, to be kind. Maybe the whole
personal planetarium idea wasn’t ready for prime time.

So I thought,
till one night at the PSAS dark site. As I was setting up Celeste, I looked
over at my (late) friend George Byron and noticed he’d pulled out a little
case. Looked like the bag for a point and shoot camera, but I noticed the word
“Celestron” emblazoned on its side. George said he’d bought this SkyScout on a
whim, but was finding some uses for it. Would I like to try it? “Sure, Georgie,
why not?”

First
impression? It was more solidly built, large, and heavy than I’d imagined,
considerably moreso than the poor MySky. Heavier, but not too heavy to manage
comfortably in adult hands. I swung around, pointed at Polaris, and mashed the
“identify” button as George instructed. With little hesitation I got a screen
of text about the North Star. Best of all, or at least the most fun thing? Retrieving
a set of earbuds from my pocket, I listened to Ms. Wood’s wonderful spiel about
Polaris.

I was downright
enchanted. Every pea-picking star I selected was properly identified, with the
brighter ones having audio to go with them. Twasn’t perfect, however. I found
the widget’s accuracy to be around 1-degree or so at best and several degrees
at worst. Trying to identify fairly close bright stars like Castor and Pollux
sometimes gave it trouble. On the other hand, the “Locate” (“go-to”) mode
worked pretty flawlessly, seeming more accurate than Identify.

I liked George’s
SkyScout so much that I began wracking my brain for possible uses for one. A
common problem for antsy observers like Unk? I like to get my scopes aligned just as soon
as the brighter stars begin to peep out. As a result, I’ve often done polar
alignments on Kocab instead of Polaris. The SkyScout would keep me straight.
And I believed it would doubtless pique the interest of my astronomy students.
Anything that keeps the sprouts interested is worth some fairly serious money.
That last was the kicker, fairly
serious. In stingy Unk’s opinion, “400” is out of the range of “fairly,” but Celestron
had recently reduced the SkyScout’s price to more palatable 200 bucks.

When I got
my own ‘Scout from Astronomics a little later, I was mostly pleased. No, as
with George’s unit, the accuracy was not up there with DSCs or go-to, but was
more than sufficient for naked eye use. I was pleased with the package. In
addition to the SkyScout, who I immediately named “Scout,” visualizing a
faithful old sensitive-nosed hound, the box from Celestron included a nice
looking case, batteries, and the USB cord used to update the SkyScout’s
firmware.

Updating the
firmware of a new piece of gear is a little scary, but I reckoned I ought to do
so anyway. I’d heard that the upgrade not only squashed some bugs, but would increase
Scout’s database from a puny 6,000 objects to a robust 40 freaking thousand. The
upgrade was easy, it turned out. When I
loaded up the software that came on an accompanying CD on my old Toshiba
laptop, I was presented with a program very similar to the one used to update Celestron
telescope HCs. Connected Scout to the computer via the USB cable, the program
squirted the new firmware over, and I was done.

It now had
40,000 objects. Most of ‘em would be invisible through Scout’s zero-power
finder, though, so “Why?” I figured the bigger database would be a Good Thing
if I wanted to link the SkyScout to a telescope with the new SkyScout Connect module and send your
SCT on go-tos to more than just the brightest and best. 99 dollars for the
Connect was a pretty reasonable price, but I never did get around to buying
one. Once again I was stymied by the puzzle of “What for?” Why would I want to
swing Scout around the sky, mashing its button for go-tos when I could just key
the object into the NexStar hand control?

I had a
lovely time using Scout for several years. He did save my bacon regarding alignment
stars a couple of time, and my freshmen/sophomore astronomy students just loved
the little thing. I won’t say I used the SkyScout every clear night, but for
the longest time he got taken out once a month at least.

Scout wasn’t
perfect, natch. In addition to middling accuracy—which I discovered could be
improved somewhat if you held the SkyScout up to your eye just so—there were some ergonomics issues. The display screen was
illuminated a subdued night vision red, which was good. What was bad was that I had to wear my readers to
make out the small, dim text when selecting objects. And take them off again to
look through the sight. And put them on again to read what Scout told me about
the target. Yadda-yadda-yadda.

More
seriously, the SkyScout was rendered almost useless by the presence of large
metal objects nearby. Anywhere
nearby. One night at the Deep South Regional Star Gaze, Scout tried to tell me
Polaris was up in the east—because of the row of cars parked along the field
edge. At least the widget displayed a little magnet icon when it was
experiencing interference problems, but it displayed that icon far too often
if’n you ask me.

And there
was one truly aggravating “feature”
of ol' Scout. To conserve battery power, the SkyScout shuts off after a few
minutes of disuse. That’s OK, but when you turn it back on it must go through
the process of getting a GPS fix all over again. While Scout’s GPS was fairly “hot”—about
as sensitive of most older hand held receivers—getting a fix did take two-three
minutes, a real pain in the butt when you’d been through that several times in
one night.

These
irritations are not what finally killed Scout for me, though. That happened
last year when I was outside under the stars with my students. This was our
first Outdoor Lab of the semester, and I’d brought Scout along. I pulled him
out of his case and announced, “Let’s identify that bright red star (Aldebaran).”
Before Scout could get a fix, three or four kids whipped out cell phones, ran
various astro-apps, and had identified Alpha Tauri.

The cells
worked in SkyScout/MySky like fashion using their onboard GPSes and compasses
and accelerometers. Hold the phone up and the sky in front of it appeared the
screen. Pan around and the sky followed on the display. Yeah, they worked like
the SkyScout and MySky, but with big and detailed high resolution color
displays. Well, not just that. The phones’ GPS receivers were way faster to get
a fix and their compasses much less prone to magnetic interference. Without
saying another word, I turned old Scout off and put him back in his case.

Last year,
there was an explosion of astronomy software for both iOS (Apple) phones, pods,
and pads, and for the same types of gadgets using the Android O/S. I’d already played
around with what was becoming the numero
uno phone astronomy application, SkySafari, running the earliest release of it on
my iPod. But I didn’t get to try its personal planetarium-like features till I
upgraded to an iPhone—the iPod does not have a compass or GPS. When I did get
my iPhone 4s, I was mucho impressed by SkySafari.

SkySafari is an amazing program. The latest
version, SkySafari Pro, features tens
of thousands of objects and millions of stars, and gives no ground to
conventional PC programs whether you are running it on a phone or a tablet. I
love it, and it was one of the first apps I loaded on my new iPhone. I had lots
of fun scanning around, watching the pretty color sky track onscreen. It was
even useful, allowing me to find a couple of alignment stars for my Sky
Commander DSCs in the gloaming the first night I had the iPhone.

Yeah, SkySafari was great. Great enough that
Scout stayed in his case, coming out only for me to change his batteries once
in a while lest they leak. The app on the iPhone was not quite like having a
personal planetarium—you didn’t get to hear any cool audio files, for
example—but it was close, and did the same things for me the Scout used to do.
I pronounced Celestron’s personal planetarium dead. It turned out I was wrong.

For a little
while, I thought Celestron might come out with a “SkyScout II,” a new model
with a big color video screen, add-on tours, and more. They never did. The
fading of the competition was probably the main reason for that. They did
release a couple of memory cards for the Scout with sky tours on ‘em, but only
a couple before the SkyScout’s development ceased (you can still buy a SkyScout
if’n you want). But that did not mean Celestron was done with the personal
planetarium idea. Just last year they released a new and better one.

I don’t
often allow manufacturers to send me unsolicited email, but I make an exception
in the case of Celestron. I’ve followed the company’s ups and downs since
almost the beginning, and even in this latter day when the Celestron we knew is
gone, replaced by a wholly owned subsidiary of a Chinese company, I am still
interested to know what they’ve got going on. One afternoon Outlook blooped it bloop that means “new
mail,” which turned out to be from the Big C. Seemed as they had entered the
iPhone app area with something called “SkyQ.”

At first, it
appeared that was not much more than yet another planetarium for iOS, one with
the Celestron moniker slapped on it. While I was more than happy with SkySafari, the idea of having an app on
my phone that included the word “Celestron” in its title proved irresistible.
Irresistible at the program’s minute $4.99 price, anyhow.

I downloaded
SkyQ from the app store that very night. What did I think? It was slightly
buggy, not surprising for a v1.0, but it mostly worked pretty well. Nice
selection of NGC objects (bumped up to all
the NGC in the next release), the sky chart was purty, showing clouds and
atmospheric effects during the day just like Stellarium, and it tracked smoothly as I moved the iPhone around
the real sky. Not that it was perfect, of course.

The first
thing I didn’t like, or at least didn’t like very much, was that the program was presented in “landscape,”
horizontal, format all the time. Most iOS apps will switch back and forth
between vertical and horizontal when you rotate the phone from vertical to
horizontal—not this one. That was not a big deal, and certainly OK when using
the charts, but I found it awkward when accessing the program’s non-chart-based
features.

What I really didn’t like was the difficulty of
swiping to move the sky. If you are using the thing indoors, or at least are
not tracking the sky with it, you hold the phone still and move the sky around.
You do that by swiping. Unfortunately, it was hard to do with the initial
release. Swiping might move the sky,
or it might just activate the “identify” function for some object. I eventually
got a little bit better at navigating SkyQ,
but that was by means of practice and experimentation, not by reading the
manual. There really wasn’t a manual or much in the way of help of any kind.

Problems
associated with moving around the sky have been much reduced in the current
release, and I can say that it now works almost as well as SkySafari in that regard. If SkyQ
were only almost as good as SkySafari, though, I’d long since have
expunged it from my phone and moved on. Why is it still there? Why am I using
it a lot?

One reason
is the extras. When you boot the app, you can swipe the main screen (which
gives you date, time, Julian date, and Local Sidereal time) and slide to useful
utilities: Sun rise and set with a nice
day/night line graphic, Moon phase with rise and set times, illuminated
percentage, and an accompanying graphic, a display of Saturn’s Moons, same-same
for Jupiter (very nice), and rise and set times for the major planets (NO PLUTO
FOR YOU!).

There’s still
more. Push “Extras” on the opening screen and you get a nice graph of planet
visibility, searchable access to the program’s object databases, a monthly Moon
phase calendar, a pretty if not overly detailed Lunar map nice for casual Moon
gazing, an ISS pass predictor which can display a map showing the station’s
current position, and a “tonight’s sky” summary of current events (planets,
meteor showers, satellite passes, etc.). There’s also a clickable link to
Celestron’s “Sky News” website. All these apps work well and would probably
have kept me playing with SkyQ, if
not as delighted with it as I became when I stumbled across one more extra.

I was outside
one night with the kids touring around with SkyQ when one of ‘em asked me how
far away Fomalhaut is, a fact I did not have squirreled away in the old
cranium. “Hmm,” said Unk, “We can get an information window, I’ll betcha.” Sure
enough, mashing the star on the screen brought up an information window that
gave us the star’s distance. It was then that I noticed something else: “Audio
Guide.” Might that be like...like…

It was just like using Old Scout. Want to know
about an object and don’t want to read tiny text? Click “Audio” for many
objects (there is four hours worth squeezed into the app) and you get a very interesting
talk about Messier Umptysquat or whatever. Only complaint? Too bad they didn’t
get Miss Sandy to record the talks again. The dude who reads the info has a
nice voice, but not as nice as hers.

The students
and I spent the next half hour cruising around the sky, listening to audio
tracks; it was indeed just like using Scout—only better. All things considered,
SkyQ, like SkySafari, was at least as accurate as the hardware personal
planetariums (accuracy is harder to judge when you are looking at a screen
rather than through a peep sight), and there was that, yes, beautiful Apple color
screen.

All that was
missing from my was a way to connect SkyQ to a telescope. It didn’t stay that
way long. Celestron released a wireless
interface for SkyQ for use with
NexStar telescopes, “SkyQ Link.” It is a little device just a bit bigger than
an older USB flash drive, and plugs into a Celestron telescope’s hand control
port.

Will I get
one? Same old bugaboo: why would it be better to click on objects on a small
iPhone screen (you can use SkyQ with
the iPad, too) than just punch them into the hand control? Turns out there is
one big reason. I’ve learned you do not need to have the hand control plugged
into the scope when you use SkyQ Link. You can/must do scope go-to alignment
with SkyQ (with a screen that appears
when you connect to the scope, apparently). Also, I've been told you can use SkyQ Link with a laptop computer to connect NexRemote to the telescope wirelessly. If that works (I haven't heard of anybody doing it yet) I WILL get the Link.

Even if NexRemote don't work with this widget, being able
to align and use my NexStars without the hand control and with no wires has a
lot of appeal—especially for public outreach. Not having cables around the
scope for kids to trip over and disconnect would be heaven.

Yes, poor
Scout sits upstairs alone in Chaos Manor South’s Massive Equipment Vault,
muchachos. Maybe I’ll find a use for him someday. Maybe I won’t. Even if I
don’t, I had a lot of fun and use out of him for years. But there is no denying
the iPhone (and Android) apps are better. The SkyScout is dead! Long live
“SkyScout II”a.k.a. SkyQ and SkySafari!

Just downloaded SkyQ and was looking it over and came across an asterism called the Stargate Cluster. I was interested because of the name so looked it up on the ole intertubes and found this URL http://platformx.sourceforge.net/Name/index.html . The URL says it's in Corvus but the info button in SkyQ says it's in or near Canes Venatici with the wrong declination (35d 47m 59s instead of -12d 03m 09s) and names it STF 1659.Don Horne

Hi Rod,I still use my ASUS netbook. I also found the battery life to be ~1-1/2 hours. I found a 10 hour battery for $50 (honestly 10 hours). It was (obviously much larger than the OEM), but as a side benefit, tilted the unit to a much more ergonomic angle for the keyboard.-Rob